Archil

Archil, venerated by the Georgian church as a martyr, was the last significant ruler of the Khosroid house in eastern Georgia, and his career, as told in the Georgian Chronicles, links the old royal line of Vakhtang Gorgasali to both the rising Bagrationi and the emerging kingdom of Abkhazia. The chronicle makes him and his brother Mihr the sons of Stepanos, prince of Iberia; modern scholars, following Cyril Toumanoff, identify this father with Stephen, ruler of Kakheti until 736, rather than with the seventh-century Stepanos II; the genealogy given here follows the chronicle. The dates attached to him vary: Toumanoff and most modern accounts place his rule from 736 to 786, while Georgian church tradition gives his martyrdom as 744. When the Umayyad general Marwan ibn Muhammad, "the Deaf" in Georgian memory, swept through Kartli in the later 730s, the brothers fled west through Egrisi to Abkhazia and joined its ruler Leon I in the defense of the fortress of Anakopia, where the Arabs were repulsed. Mihr, wounded, died soon after, and his daughter Goranduxt was married to Leon I, through whom the later kings of Abkhazia could claim Khosroid descent. Returning east, Archil rebuilt what the invasion had ruined, refounding Nukhpati and other settlements and pressing Christianity on the pagan mountaineers of Kakheti. His own marriage reached across dynasties: the chronicle says his wife was a daughter of the curopalates Guaram, of the house of Vakhtang, a Guaramid princess whom Georgian tradition counts among the forebears of the Bagrationi. They had two sons, Juansher and Ivane, and four daughters, Goranduxt, Mariam, Mihranduxt, and Shushan. Archil also granted lands in Artani to Adarnase, father of Ashot I the Great, whose daughter Latavri later married Juansher. His death came when an Arab governor, named Chichnaum or Asim in the chronicle and identified by modern writers with Khuzayma ibn Khazim, demanded that he embrace Islam and reveal where the emperor Heraclius had left his treasure in Georgia. Archil refused and was beheaded. His followers buried him at Notkora, in Kakheti, in a church he had built. The Georgian church commemorates him on 21 June.